Back to School

Bonni Stachowiak: Today on Episode Number 428 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, I’ve got some ideas for getting back to school.

Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

[music]

Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives, and be even more present for our students.

[music]

I know not everyone is necessarily heading back to start a new academic year, but enough of us are that it made sense for me today on the episode to talk a little bit about some advice that I have really for myself and for many of you for what to be thinking about when we start new. Even if you’re not starting a new academic year, thinking about the next time you start teaching a new class, this advice will certainly be applicable to those seasons when we’re starting anew.

The first piece of advice I would like to give has to do with starting small. This upcoming academic year, we’re going to be distributing copies of the second edition of James Lang’s Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. We’re also going to be doing a book club on it in the fall semester, and we’re also going to be working through it with our new faculty. It’s been in my hand both digitally and physically, a lot recently. In fact, in the show notes, I have linked not only to a copy of the book, but also to some flashcards that I did up on Quizlet, in case you wanted a nice way of reviewing some of the key points from the book.

Then I also when we think about starting small, I want to harken back to Tom Tobin’s and Kirsten Behling’s Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education, where they talk about doing a plus one. When you learn something new, like Universal Design for Learning, or you’re thinking about trying something new with your teaching, rather than trying to transform everything, what is a one small thing that plus one that we can do to change things for the better. Because, otherwise, if we don’t start small, then we can become just stuck wherever we are. It feels too big. It’s too overwhelming.

Starting small is really going to be a theme that you’ll hear me say throughout, not just today’s episode, but actually it’s a big theme throughout this entire podcast experience that I’ve had starting small. When we think about starting small, if you’re going to be really weighing on whether it’s more important that you have the most perfect lecture or the perfect content, or whether you have found a good way of engaging students, I would always invite you to err on the side of engaging first. I’ve linked in the show notes to an article from all the way back in 2016 by James Lang, talking about “Small Changes in Teaching: The First 5 Minutes of Class”.

Even if you just start out those first five minutes of your very first class, asking students to share a little bit, maybe have them predict something, what do you think happened here or play them a little bit of an audio clip, and then ask them to predict what happened next, or any way to get them thinking and get their brains percolating is going to be a wonderful way to start to build a culture of learning. A lot of learning is that comfortableness with failing. We’re not always going to get the right answers. Sometimes there aren’t even right answers, perhaps even asking some questions that don’t have right or wrong answers but are getting perspectives and getting some ideas out there.

Something that I tried for the first time in January of 2022 is to use a tool, which I first learned about from Tracie Addy when she was on the show, and the tool is called the Who’s in Class? Form: A Tool for Fostering Inclusion. This is something that has been used across multiple universities to get a better sense of who is enrolled in your class. I would say that there are probably two ways that really stand out to me, and there’s many ways but two that come to mind right now, as far as why the tool was beneficial was something a little different I hadn’t done before.

I tended to think and ask questions related to commuters as if they were a monolith, and where I teach someone saying that their commuter could mean that they live 10 minutes down the road, or it could mean that they drive or take public transportation two hours when they come to campus to take classes. For me, the Who’s in Class? Form allowed me to have a much greater appreciation of when someone says commuter, exactly what are we talking about there.

Then the second way that I think it helped me was in the form of asking questions about different types of abilities, any aspects of disability that students wanted to disclose in that form. I think it both normalized help seeking behavior. I think when we recognize that a lot of disabilities don’t go through. A disability services office aren’t formally documented for a lot of reasons one of which being that sense of not wanting to disclose. Just being able to open up a little bit more of a conversation around those things I thought was particularly helpful and useful, and something that I hadn’t necessarily done very effectively in the past, beyond just the formal accommodations that come through our disability services.

The next bit of advice I have for you, for me, for all of us is to leave room. What do I mean by that? We got to leave ourselves a little bit of margin. Block some times in your calendar, for example, for grading major assignments and giving that feedback. I do a pretty decent job of breaking major assignments into their smallest of components, but what I sometimes miss is recognizing then what is going to necessitate the turnaround time for me to get students the feedback that they need to be able to progress to that next step in the assignment. That technique can be really helpful in terms of thinking through those things.

Also, ask yourself, is there a week? This is assuming a lot if you’re teaching more of a traditional semester, or you’ve got a little bit longer classes, is there a week of classes, where it’s going to make sense rather than to have regular class meetings to have small group meetings where students are working on aspects of a project during class, and you’re there to answer questions. Or is there a week where it makes sense to change things up is that a time where you can have where they can sign up in groups of one to three, if it’s individual projects. Or if you’re going to have individual groups come in and talk to you, is there going to be a week where you set aside time for those meetings instead of typical class sessions.

Then the next piece of advice I have for you is a theme that’s really extended throughout a lot of Teaching in Higher Ed, think about ways to extend the audience. As I mentioned that I’ve been picking up James Lang’s second edition of Small Teaching, and this is something that came out to me a new, a fresh way of looking at this and him talking about extending the audience. I think sometimes we can think that means something really big and hard to scale everything from having a full on night.

When I got to talk to someone from Chico State, the wonderful work that they do up there to have an entire week dedicated to a particular theme and it’s cross disciplinary, and lots of students have an opportunity to meet with and learn from and share to members of the government, members of local businesses, et cetera. It doesn’t have to be that big. In fact, in Small Teaching, James Lang reminds us that it could even just be an imaginary audience that helps to think about when we’re practicing whatever the skill is, whatever that cognitive competence is that we’re building, even if the audience is a made-up one, a fictitious one, that can help.

He talks about in the book practicing for himself the difference that has made for him practicing talks that he’s going to give to different universities. He recognizes the importance of practice, but that’s sometimes hard to translate to students. Thinking about extending the audience on a continuum, we can start small just by having even a made-up audience that will give us a little bit of an opportunity to practice. In the past, I have done something as small as inviting a few local people from the community to come in and give authentic feedback.

By that, I mean authentic feedback. This is how whatever it is that you have shared. This is how someone within this given context receives that, and it actually just be incredibly helpful. I think about the times when students aren’t sure why we’re asking them to do things. How much does the knowledge and the skills that we’re attempting to build up actually matter out there? Sometimes this is said in the real world, but I think back to Robin DeRosa who’s like, we’re already in the real world, and sometimes that can be a condescending way to talk about it. I think authenticity is probably a less condescending and more precise term, but who can we invite because there’s just a few people that can come in, and is it students giving presentations or is it that they review their proposals, their pitches as if they were receiving them and how they would go about responding to those in a more authentic context.

Then, yes, if your university does have a broader university initiative, is that a common day of learning, something like that, where more sharing of student learning happens on a more global scale? That can be something really important to find out about and figure out ways that you might be able to tap into it.

If you can’t, necessarily, this particular term or this semester, is that something that you can then put down on some type of a particular file for later on you to be able to come back and get the information when you need it so you can incorporate it into your syllabus. Or is it something that you could even just have students attend and participate in without them necessarily sharing. That could be another thing that can be helpful for them.

Well, it is time for so many of us to go back to school. I am wishing you the absolute best in all of those endeavors. This is a time in the show where I get to share some recommendations. In our summertime here in Southern California, I got ill for about a week or so. I was really, really not happy at all. It’s not exactly how you wish you could spend a little bit of supposedly less stressful time. I went on Twitter, and I asked people for some movie and TV recommendations, something to make me laugh. I got some really good ones. In fact, I got so many. I couldn’t watch all of them, but I did my work. I would like to share three of the things that came through that people recommended that I did have an opportunity to watch, although no doubt, others that are great, that are up there.

The first thing I’d like to do is recommend that you check out the movie and TV recommendations that people had for me when I was under the weather. I link to that Twitter thread in the show notes. You can go check that out. Then I’d like to share three of the television/movie recommendations I received that I did have a chance to view, that I do highly recommend. The first one is Cha Cha Real Smooth. This was recommended to me on Twitter from Thomas Chase Hagood. This is a description from the Internet Movie Database. It says, “A young man who works as a Bar Mitzvah party host strikes up a friendship with a mother and her autistic daughter.” It was a wonderful story. I really enjoyed it. Thank you, Thomas, for the recommendation.

Then the next one is a television show. I binge the whole thing in record time. Thank you to Andrew Isaac for recommending The Grinder. This is a description from the Internet Movie Database. “Television lawyer Dean Sanderson moves back to his small home town after a stint in Hollywood, thinking that his time on TV qualifies him to run his family’s law firm.” This was such a delightful watch. There were so many inside references where the overly confident television lawyer gets a lot more attention than his brother who actually is a lawyer who has actually passed the bar and is licensed to practice law. It’s hilarity. There’s some really funny, again, inside jokes that come out of it. Just the confidence that comes from the TV lawyer is pretty funny to watch and to think about how some of this actually comes into play in terms of confidence levels and higher education, and how deserved or not they are.

Anyway, it was just a great, great fun. Andrew, that was such a perfect, perfect, perfect recommendation for me. Thank you for that.

Then the third one that I’d like to share about comes from Brad Gilligan Knight. Brad recommended Loot, which is on Apple TV+. This is the description from the Internet Movie Database. “After divorcing her husband of 20 years, Molly Novak must figure out what to do with her $87 billion settlement. She decides to reengage with her charitable foundation and connect with the real world, finding herself along the way.” Thank you, Brad. That was a wonderful recommendation. As of this particular recording, there are still episodes to come, and I’m finding this is now one where every single week I’m looking forward to when I get that notification that a new episode has popped up.

Once again, thanks to everybody who replied to the thread, my desperate request to help me find some ways to laugh. You really did. You helped distract me from my misery. Again, as of this recording, I am doing so much better. I’m having one of those like, “Oh my gosh, there’s hope in the world.” I’ve definitely, certainly turned a corner. Thank goodness, because we’ve got a lot of very busy weeks ahead in terms of, well, in every aspect of my life. Again, really appreciate the people who made recommendations. I only recommend things that I have either watched, tried myself, or read, et cetera, and so wanted to recommend those three, but I still have a good treasure trove to go back to in the coming weeks and months. I really appreciate people who engaged with that.

[music]

This has been Episode 428 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. We went back to school. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak, and was edited by the ever-talented Andrew Kroger.

Podcast production support was provided by the wonderful Sierra Smith. This podcast is just one of the resources that comes out from Teaching in Higher Ed. If you would like to subscribe to the weekly update, you will get the show notes for the most recent update. Also, some things that don’t show up on the podcast like quotable words and related episodes and other recommendations that are fresh just for that medium. Head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe to subscribe to the weekly update. Thanks so much for listening. I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

[music]

[00:16:52] [END OF AUDIO]

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.